Other languages

August 20, 2016

Radio 4's Today programme this morning included an interview with Gibralterian historian Tito Vallejo Smith, who spoke about the local vernacular, Llanito, pronounced janito (listen again here - scroll through to 1 hr 57 min). The official language of Gibraltar is English, but just about everyone also speaks Spanish, and Gibralterians are very likely to change language mid-sentence when they are speaking.

Llanito is a mixture of Spanish and English, with borrowings from French, Portuguese and other languages. According to Wikipedia, the origin of the word is uncertain. In Spanish llanito means 'little flatland' (the land surrounding the Rock consists of plain and marshland). Another suggested origin is that Llanito comes from the diminutive of the Italian given name Gianni, given that in the late 18th century and early 19th century the majority of the male population of Gibraltar came from Genoa.

Tito Vallejo Smith has written a dictionary of Llanito. Here's an article in which he talks about how the language is currently under threat.

October 12, 2015

Nu Shu, also written Nüshu, is a script or writing system that was developed and used exclusively by women in China's Jiangyong county in Hunan province. Unlike the Chinese logographic script, where characters represent concepts, Nu Shu is syllabic and based on pronunciation. The script was developed several hundred years ago at a time when women and girls were not given an education. As they were not taught to read and write the Chinese script, women taught each other Nu Shu. Mothers would give their daughters booklets written in the script on their marriage, or girls would give such books to their close friends or 'sworn sisters'. The language started to die out in the 20th century as girls as well as boys were educated.

A US-based Chinese musician, Tan Dun, has spent several years collecting stories and songs written in Nu Shu, and has created a symphony from them. The BBC has a short video on it (here). For more on Nu Shu, see here.

October 11, 2015

Yesterday's Times (of London) newspaper included a crossword where all the answers were in Latin. Latin crosswords will now appear on a weekly basis in the newspaper. The first crossword was published in the Times in February 1930, and a few weeks later the newspaper published a Latin version. However, until yesterday, there hadn't been another one in the 85 years since then.

An article in the Times (which only subscribers can see, but there is a copy here) said that anyone with a basic grounding in Latin should be able to solve the puzzle. It is called O Tempora, the name being taken from Cicero's comment on the dissolute customs in Rome in 63BC, O tempora o mores (oh the times, oh the customs). It is set by Auctor. Llewelyn Morgan, an Oxford don, said that the Romans were very keen on puns and anagrams, such as amor (love) being Roma in reverse.

September 23, 2015

It’s often said that the Inuit have dozens of words for snow. Well, researchers compiling a historical thesaurus of Scots at the University of Glasgow have found that that language has over 400 words for snow. They include: flindrikin, a light snow shower, spitters, small drops or flakes of wind-driven rain or snow, feefle, meaning ‘to swirl’, sneesl, to begin to rain or snow, and nester, to drizzle, rain or snow slightly. There are words more likely to be used by children, too, such as Katty-clean-doors, a child’s word for snow, and brizz, to make (a slide), by beating and stamping snow until it is hard and smooth.

Some of these words were discussed on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning (listen to the clip here). The website of the Historical Thesaurus of Scots is here.

May 18, 2015

The 2016 edition of Le Petit Larousse French dictionary is to include the new word selfie, as well as focaccia, biryani, vegan, big data, bitcoin and captcha. It will also include the Quebec word for selfie, égoportrait.

There are also new non-English words entering the dictionary, including bolos, someone ridiculous, naive and bordering on the stupid, and tuto, an online how-to video or tutorial.

March 18, 2015

I heard a woman on the radio the other day say she was swithering, when asked about who she was going to vote for in the forthcoming general election. The Radio 4 Today programme presenter Jim Naughtie used the word swithering too. They were both Scottish, and the verb to swither is a Scottish word. It means to dither or be undecided. According to this article, it is such a common word in Scotland that Scots are often surprised to find that those of us south of the border don’t know it.

The article cites former MP and MSP Winnie Ewing who said swither in the House of Commons: "The members all stopped and said, 'I don't understand'. I wondered what the English word for 'swither' was, and they shouted, 'prevaricate' and 'hesitate'. Neither of those words is exactly the same as 'swither' ...” The word swither may also include the idea that the speaker is in a state of nervous agitation and can indicate that there is fitful movement involved. The Dictionary of the Scots Language records a number of instances of swithering cloud formations and unstable markets.

The OED is unsure of the origin of swither and states that any connection with similar Old English words cannot be assumed with certainty.

December 28, 2014

I'm linking today to a few articles I've spotted on the varying fortunes of a number of world languages.

A piece on Al Jazeera America reports how independence and increasing economic confidence can revitalise an endangered or vulnerable language. It cites the Basque language as an example, saying it is thriving as a result of the Basque region's economic strength. Other examples of languages that have experienced a resurgence as a result of their region achieving a reasonable level of autonomy and prosperity include Catalan, Welsh, Hawaiian and Maori. Similarly, the position of the Kurdish language is becoming more secure, according to the article, as Erbil's region becomes more prosperous and gains more autonomy. Daniel Kaufman of the Endangered Language Alliance has said that the situation concerning linguistic diversity these days is being shaped by policy and economic realities (see this BBC article as well as the aforementioned one). The Al Jazeera America piece reports on indigenous languages on the territory of the USA that are growing in size and influence; this year Alaska became the second state (the first was Hawaii) to officially recognise its indigenous languages.

Another BBC piece looks at Sanskrit, currently spoken by barely 1% of Indians. There has been much argument and debate recently in response to a government order to increase the teaching of Sanskrit in schools. The BBC piece focuses on a village in Bangalore's region, where shopkeepers, labourers and other ordinary people communicate quite happily and productively in Sanskrit. This is significant because Sanskrit has in the past been criticised for being an upper-caste language.

At the other end of the spectrum, The Guardian has a piece on a critically endangered Sami language, Ume Sami, now spoken by fewer than 50 people in Lapland, north Sweden. The Ume Sami language is not related to Swedish, an Indo-European language; it belongs to the Uralic group (as do Finnish and Estonian). Many of its words relate specifically to the surrounding environment and the people's economic livelihood. For instance, one word that is impossible to translate into Swedish or English refers to intricate markings made on a reindeer's ear to distinguish ownership. The decline in the language is mirrored in the second-class treatment of the Sami minority and prejudice meted out in the past, when it was forbidden and/or considered shameful to speak a Sami language. Many things have changed now, including government policy, but even so, it is not easy to revive a language with so few speakers. There is an increasing pride in Sami identity and a push to revitalise the language - there is even an app for this.

The three articles worth reading are here (Al Jazeera America on Basque et al), here (BBC on Sanskrit), and here (The Guardian on Ume Sami).

December 23, 2014

You’ve probably heard of Spanglish, Hinglish and Chinglish. The Guardian has a piece on its website about Uglish, a version of English spoken in Uganda. Some Uglish words will be recognisably English to speakers elsewhere, eg dirten to make dirty, cowardise to behave like a coward, and wiseaching acting like a wiseacre. Others, however, being influenced by Luganda and other local languages, will not be familiar to English speakers elsewhere: mazongoto a big bed, and wolokosso loose talk.

For more Uglish words and details of a book on the topic by Bernard Sabiti, see the Guardianpage.

December 21, 2014

I was chatting to a German friend, partly in German and partly in English, with the aim of improving my German, when I asked her for a German equivalent of the English bog-standard, which means ordinary, run-of-the-mill, or nothing to write home about. The equivalent in German is 08/15 (pronounced as the separate numbers - Nullachtfünfzehn), as in "Dieses Verfahren ist 08/15" (This procedure is pretty standard/ordinary).

The term dates back to the First World War. The MG 08/15 was a particular model of a range of machine guns (see the English Wikipedia page). It was, seemingly, a clumsy and bulky weapon.

As for the origin of bog-standard, the OED says that there seems to be no connection with the meaning of bog as wet spongy ground. The most commonly held view is that bog-standard was a mishearing or misinterpretation of box-standard, which is defined in the OED when an adjective as 'In motoring, engineering, and other technical contexts: in standard manufactured form, unmodified; (hence) basic, unexceptional'. This usage comes from the noun, which is 'the main framework of a machine or engine'.

The French Académie de la Carpette anglaise, which translates at 'the Doormat Academy', gives an annual 'award' to a French person or organisation that chooses to eschew the French language in favour of English. The 2014 award went to Pierre Moscovici, a member of the European Commission, who wrote a letter to his fellow countryman, French minister Michel Sapin, entirely in English.

See here for the story (in French, of course), and see this old post of mine for some background information.